Still saluting, the figure collapses, plunging into the azure tropical water.
The voice of Webster reads, “ ‘The end.’ ”
ACT III, SCENE THREE
We open with the distinct pop of a champagne cork, dissolving to reveal Miss Kathie and myself standing in the family crypt. Froth spills from the bottle she holds, splashing on the stone floor as Miss Kathie hurries to pour wine into the two dusty champagne glasses I hold. Here, in the depths of stone beneath the cathedral where she was so recently wed, Miss Kathie takes a glass and lifts it, toasting a new urn which rests on the stone shelf beside the urns engraved Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., Loverboy, Lothario. All of her long-dead loved ones.
The new urn of shining, polished silver sits engraved with the name Terrence Terry, and includes a smudged lipstick kiss identical to the old kisses dried to the magenta of ancient blood, almost black on the urns now rusted and tarnished with age.
Miss Kathie lifts her glass in a toast to this newest silver urn, saying, “Bonne nuit, Terrence.” She sips the champagne, adding, “That’s Spanish for bon voyage.”
Around us a few flickering candles light the dusty, cold crypt, shimmering amid the clutter of empty wine bottles. Dirty champagne glasses hold dead spiders, each spider curled like a bony fist. Abandoned ashtrays hold stubbed cigarettes smudged with a long history of lipstick shades, the cigarettes yellowed, the lipstick faded from red to pink. Ashes and dust. The mirror of Miss Kathie’s real face, scratched and scarred with her past, lies facedown among the souvenirs and sacrifices of everything she’s left behind. The pill bottles half-full of Tuinal and Dexamyl. Nembutal, Seconal and Demerol.
Tossing back her champagne and pouring herself another glass, Miss Kathie says, “I think we ought to record this occasion, don’t you?”
She means for me to prop the mirror in its upright position while she stands on the lipstick X marked on the floor. Miss Kathie holds out her left hand to me, her fingers spread so I can remove her Harry Winston diamond solitaire. When her face aligns with the mirror, her eyes perfectly bracketed by the crow’s-feet, her lips centered between the scratched hollows and sagging cheeks, only when she’s exactly superimposed on the record of her past… do I take the diamond and begin to draw.
On the opening night of Unconditional Surrender, she says Terry had paid her a visit backstage, in her dressing room before the first curtain. In the chaos of telegrams and flowers, it’s likely Terry purloined the Jordan almonds. He’d stopped to convey his best wishes and inadvertently made off with the poisoned candy, saving her life. Poor Terrence. The accidental martyr.
As Miss Kathie speculates, I plow the diamond along the soft surface of the mirror, gouging her new wrinkles and worry lines into our cumulative written record.
Since then, Miss Kathie says she’s ransacked Webster’s luggage. We can’t risk overlooking any new murder schemes. She’s discovered yet another final chapter, a seventh draft of the Love Slave finale. “It would seem that I’m to be shot by an intruder next,” she says, “when I interrupt him in the process of burgling my home.”
But at last she’s managed a counterattack: she’s mailed this newest final chapter to her lawyer, sealed within a manila envelope, with the instructions that he should open it and read the contents should she meet a sudden, suspicious death. After that she informed the Webster of her actions. Of course he vehemently denied any plot; he protested and railed that he’d never written such a book. He insisted that he’d only ever loved her and had no intention to cause her harm. “But that’s exactly,” Miss Kathie says, “what I’d expected him to say, the evil cad.”
Now, in the event Miss Kathie falls under an omnibus, bathes with an electric radio, feeds herself to grizzly bears, tumbles from a tall building, sheathes an assassin’s sharp dagger with her heart or ingests cyanide-then Webster Carlton Westward III will never get to publish his terrible “lie-ography.” Her lawyers will expose his ongoing plot. Instead of hitting any best-seller list, the Webster will go sit in the electric chair.
All the while, I drag the diamond’s point to draw Miss Kathie’s new gray hairs onto the mirror. I tap the glass to mark any new liver spots.
“I should be safe,” Miss Kathie says, “from any homicidal burglars.”
Under pressure, the mirror bends and distorts, stretching and warping my Miss Kathie’s reflection. The glass feels that fragile, crisscrossed with so many flaws and scars.
Miss Kathie lifts her glass in a champagne toast to her reflected self, saying, “As Webb’s ultimate punishment, I made him marry me…”
The would-be assassin has now become her full-time, live-in love slave.
The bright-brown-eyed wonder will do her bidding, collect her dry cleaning, chauffeur her, scour her bathroom, run errands, wash her dishes, massage her feet and provide any specific oral-genital pleasure Miss Kathie deems necessary, until death do they part. And even then, it had best not be her death or the Webster will likely find himself arrested.
“But just to be on the safe side…” she says, and reaches to retrieve something off the stone shelf. From among the abandoned pill bottles and outdated cosmetics and contraceptives, Miss Kathie’s hand closes around something she carries back to her fur coat pocket. She says, “Just in case…” and slips this new item, tinted red with rust, blue with oil, into her coat pocket.
It’s a revolver.
ACT III, SCENE FOUR
Here we dissolve into yet another flashback. Let’s see the casting office at Monogram Pictures or Selig studios along Gower Street, what everyone called “Poverty Row,” or maybe the old Central Casting offices on Sunset Boulevard, where a crowd of would-be actresses mill about all day with their fingers crossed. These, the prettiest girls from across the world, voted Miss Sweet Corn Queen and Cherry Blossom Princess. A former reigning Winter Carnival Angel, a Miss Bountiful Sea Harvest. A pantheon of mythic goddesses made flesh and blood. Miss Best Jitterbug. A beauty migration, all of them vying for greater fame and glory. Among them, a couple of the girls draw your focus. One girl, her eyes are set too close together, her nose dwarfs her chin, her head rests squarely on her chest without any hint of an intervening neck.
The second young woman, waiting in the casting office, cooling her heels… her eyes are the brightest amethyst purple. An almost supernatural violet.
In this flashback, we watch the ugly young woman, the plain woman, as she watches the lovely woman. The monstrous young woman, shoulders slumped, hands hanging all raw knuckled and gnawed fingernails, she spies on the young woman with the violet eyes. More important, the ugly woman watches the way in which the other people watch the lovely woman. The other actors seem stunned by those violet eyes. When the pretty one smiles, everyone watching her also smiles. Within moments of first seeing her, other people stand taller, pulling their bellies back to their spines. These queens and ladies and angels, their hands cease fidgeting. They adopt her same shoulders-back posture. Even their breathing slows to match that of the lovely girl. Upon seeing her, every woman seems to become a lesser version of this astonishing girl with violet eyes.
In this flashback, the ugly girl has almost given up hope. She’s studied her craft with Constance Collier and Guthrie McClintic and Margaret Webster, yet she still can’t find work. The homely girl does possess an innate, shrewd cunning; none of her gestures is ever without intention and motivation. In her underplaying, the ugly girl displays nothing short of brilliance. Even as she watches those present unconsciously mimic the lovely girl, the ugly one considers a plan. As a possible alternative to becoming an actress herself, perhaps the better strategy would be to join forces-combining her own skill and intelligence with the other girl’s beauty. Between the two of them, they might yield one immortal motion picture star.